


Autumn in One Thought

by disenchanted



Category: First World War RPF
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Poetry, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unreliable Narrator, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-04-02 10:44:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4057054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Siegfried remembers, and remembers, and remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Autumn in One Thought

**Author's Note:**

> Written to M.'s prompt (thank you for throwing me a bone :-P): _'[Owen] remarked that he had not yet told his new friend [Sassoon] “that I am not worthy to light his pipe. I simply sit tight and tell him where I think he goes wrong."' Wilfred telling Siegfried where he’s gone wrong._ I may have veered off the beaten prompt a little, but this quote did inform my depiction of their relationship.
> 
> I used what historical detail I remembered, but this isn't stringently fact-checked, and quite a bit of it is made up. Mea culpa. Probably-generally-accurate historical notes are in the end notes. NB: Opinions on Robert Graves are not author's own.

I will go up the hill once more  
To find the face of him that I have lost

—Siegfried Sassoon, _The Last Meeting_.

 

…August blurring the tops of the trees, Siegfried remembered. Starshine through the overlapping leaves, and owls hidden in the branches, calling. So long afterwards, Siegfried could only see it as if he were dreaming or drunk. There was a smudge of blue here, a mass of grey there, and in front of him, almost too close to see properly, Wilfred glancing over his shoulder. Yes, August, going on partridge season, though there were no partridges on the grounds of Craiglockhart War Hospital. Bullfrogs and crickets sat in the long wet grass; beyond the lawn the wood shook with noise. But he and Wilfred were going from the wood, towards the hospital, which lay patiently in wait. 

'It isn't too terribly late,' said Siegfried.

'Ah, is it not?' said Wilfred, warming. Siegfried thought he could feel him rise and toughen with a long gulp of breath. 'I'm sorry, I can't read my wristwatch in the dark.'

'It's a quarter after ten.' From beneath the cuff of his greatcoat, the hands of Siegfried's watch glowed radium-green.

'Well…another walk around the lawn, then.'

'If we go in, there will be someone playing "Keep the Home Fires Burning" on the gramophone, and you'll ask me to copy out one of my poems so that you can put it in the _Hydra_.'

After a pause, during which their only noises were those of their boots shuffling through the grass, Wilfred said, '"Bank holidays, and picture shows, and spats, / And going to the office in the train." What was it before that? The rhyme was "regain."'

'"Mocked by hopeless longing to."'

'Yes, mocked…Would it be mocking to put it in the _Hydra_? I mean that for us the longing isn't so hopeless; we've picture-shows here. But I want the poem, it's…' What had he said? Siegfried asked himself. It's good—no, it's true—no. It's that— 'It's that "you see them"…. I don't think they believe anyone does.'

'And they're right to believe so.' Siegfried swung round with his hands in his pockets, avoiding at the last minute a collision with a hedge. Wilfred's shoulder rustled along the leaves. '"I see them," no, I saw them when I was in France.'

Did they dream, his men, when they were slumped against each other in a sloughing hollow in the parados of the forward trench; when their jaws hung slack and their mouths were coated with dust? Was it picture-shows they saw? When Siegfried dreamt, he saw the streaks of dirt in David's fair hair; the wilting bloom of snowdrop the boy had once tucked in the button-hole of his front pocket. He dreamt he lay in a bunk in a dugout, where specks of earth fell from the ceiling, and he soiled his blanket with the mud on his boots. Against the planks of wood that supported the walls, the light of his guttering lamp trembled; he caught an impression of the shadows as his eyes flickered open half-unseeingly. Someone was there, silhouetted…. 

Wilfred was before him, silhouetted against the yellow rows of the hospital's windows. Not very many of the patients had gone to bed.

'…This is a different kind of seeing,' Wilfred was saying. 'At the risk of belabouring the obvious. But I've always thought that one sees most clearly after the fact; that's why I can write, here, I can see what I've only lived before. When you're in it you're too close. Surely you've felt that.'

It was only after Wilfred was dead that Siegfried considered Wilfred might not have seen him until after they parted. It might have been in Scarborough, as Wilfred was bitten by the winds coming in from the North Sea, that the image of Siegfried—in his violet dressing gown, perhaps, smoking a pipe at his desk; or in an armchair at the club in Edinburgh, rattling the ice in his whisky—coalesced in Wilfred's mind, and was fixed.

What a mind for Siegfried to be fixed in! It had the lusciousness of down and the bearing of a tower. It was opening up onto a plain Siegfried could see only from afar; and it was lifting. When Siegfried read Wilfred's lines on dead youth, he felt the stinging pride of a father who has seen himself surpassed. He wished, out of envy, to turn back; to make his dignified descent. He told Wilfred to call them 'doomed youth,' and it was true then that they were only doomed.

It was just as likely that Wilfred was up the line again when he first saw Siegfried truly. Lying in a hole, watching Jones' blood darken his tunic, thinking not of 'the magnificent recession of farewell' but of death as it was lived; it might have been then that Wilfred remembered the stable press of Siegfried's chest against his own, and saw that Siegfried loved too violently to pity. It might have been, thought Siegfried, snorting, _When Captain Cook first sniff'd the wattle, / And love Columbus'd Aristotle._

'"Sniff'd the wattle" sounds almost unfit to print,' Siegfried remembered saying; he had peered at the book over Wilfred's shoulder. Wilfred's thumb, scrubbed clean and with the nail newly trimmed, blotted out half a line of Siegfried's inscription. 'And the following line I can't make heads or tails of.'

The train going north, in the opposite direction of Wilfred, sounded its whistle and began chugging laboriously out of the station. Steam clouded the skylights, sifting around the clock and the departures board; the faint fug of coal slicked the air. It required a considerable effort not to dive in search of a gas mask. The chill Siegfried felt was less the winter than his terror, which was as inexplicable and impossible to control as any other automatic function. Years of Keats and Shelley could not shore him up against it, not any more than they could shore him up against hunger, sleep, or sickness.

'Well, you see, _love_ …,' began Wilfred, hefting his pack up his shoulder, 'simply Columbus'd Aristotle!' Despite the sly quivering smile, Siegfried saw something of the tutor in him, and imagined him in Bordeaux, patiently explaining Lethe and Hippocrene to an uncomprehending French boy. 'The first line explains itself upon examination—'

'Ha! It may have an explanation; it doesn't have an excuse.'

'And then of course it's "love _discovered_ Aristotle." Actually, it's quite interesting: more often it's the lover who's doing the discovering.'

'Unless Cupid is involved,' said Siegfried. 'But it could hardly have been "cupid'd Aristotle." How about this: "When Lieutenant O first sniff'd the heather / And Captain S snap't loose the tether."'

'Too many vowels for Mr. Strong.'

Something in the motion of the crowd on the platform portended the arrival of Wilfred's train. The dark-coated passengers coalesced, shifting forward to the platform's edge. Heads craned out to look towards where the track vanished; the black nose of the train was just beginning to come into view. Siegfried was struck violently by a memory of standing on the platform at Dumbridge, waiting to go to Litherland to be court-martialled for refusing to fight. He could not stop reciting to himself: _I shall not ask Jean-Jacques Rousseau / If birds confabulate or no_. As he watched Wilfred tuck _A Human Voice_ into his pocket and ascend the step of the awaiting train, Siegfried heard it again, slightly bent: _I shall not ask Jean-Jacques Rousseau / If love Columbus'd Aristotle_.

There was a reserve in Wilfred's parting smile that could not be ascribed to his return to duty; he looked, in fact, as if he were stowing his joy in a safe place. Siegfried had once buried a present of foreign coins in the garden at Weirleigh, only to forget which oak he had left it under.

'Why don't I come with you?' said Siegfried, half-meaning it. 'If they didn't notice that Graves wasn't escorting me, they won't notice that I'm escorting you.'

'I think Rivers would miss you.'

'Pish-posh.' 

'And,' Wilfred went on, still standing in the stairwell of the carriage despite the slow onwards-nudging of the train, 'I don't know how the golfing is in Scarborough.'

'In that case,' said Siegfried, hollowly aware of his own inadequacy, 'I had better…' But the whistle was sounding; the wheels were rumbling; Wilfred had moved farther from him than he realised, though he had leant his head out of the doorway to keep sight of Siegfried.

'We'll see each other soon!' Wilfred called out. That, Siegfried remembered realising vaguely, was his usual phrase, a vestige of the Wilfred that Siegfried had never known. It must have been what he called out to his mother in 1915, as he left for an officer's training camp.

 

* * *

 

Their last night alone together at Craiglockhart had come and gone two or three days earlier. Those days seemed to run according to the same anti-logic as trench time. At the front, time was marked by the stopping and starting of the barrages, the arrival of cold food from the reserve trenches; ages ended and began with stand-to. At Craiglockhart, the only barrages were the dreams—which Wilfred admitted he still had—and the mutterings of men, half-asleep or terribly awake, filling the great gloomy corridors like a fog. Past midnight Siegfried almost couldn't bear to open the door. 

Yet he opened the door for Wilfred, the first night and the last. It was beginning to be early morning; it had been hours since they had returned from their farewell dinner at Rivers' club in Edinburgh. Wilfred appeared in the doorway wearing a scruffy blue dressing gown over his army-issue pyjamas. Siegfried thought he looked like a child, indescribably frightened and in need of comfort. 

'Let me pour you a cup of whisky,' said Siegfried.

'You gave me champagne at the club.' 

All the same Wilfred sat on the edge of Sassoon's bed, knees together and hands at either side of him, scrubbing unconsciously at the bedspread. But for the fact that he sat on the bed, he was the image of the knocker on the door. He had a politeness made brittle and nervy by his reverence.

Siegfried, after handing off the cup of whisky—'No ice or soda I'm afraid,' he said—came to sit by Wilfred. The proximity effected an unspoken, an unspeakable intimacy. Siegfried had lain, never mind sat, on a good deal of beds with a good deal of men. To have Wilfred there was to take possession of him psychically; to integrate him into the constant, ordinary stream of Siegfried's habit. Siegfried had thought then that such possession was a measure of protection. If Wilfred was on his bed, talking about his efforts to do the sort of work Siegfried had implored him to do, then he was not anywhere else.

'It's all _about_ to happen, isn't it?' Siegfried observed. ' _Shall_ shine, _shall_ be their pall. This poem isn't about the dead, it's about the ones who are going to die.'

'Yes,' said Wilfred, with a startling equanimity. 'The future dead. One might say the condemned… No, not the condemned, that makes us seem as if we're—'

Recognising what he had said, Wilfred let the point lie.

'Is it very strange,' said Siegfried after a moment, 'that I don't feel particularly alive? I don't mean dead, or even condemned, simply…status quo, as if there couldn't be anything else. I feel I must be becoming complacent again.'

'Again? Were you ever complacent?'

'Oh yes, terrifically. The…the objection took a long time to come on. Graves will tell you about my days as "Mad Jack," which of course now can be passed off as an initial stage of my madness, but before then I was nothing more than a good officer. Not great….'

Wilfred laughed in disbelief. Ponderously he drank the last of his whisky; then, with the empty cup in his hands, cradled between his parted knees, he said, '"I know that he is lost among the stars, / And may return no more but in their light. / Though his hushed voice'—Wilfred's voice was hushed—'may call me in the stir / Of whispering trees, I shall not understand."' Is that not great enough?'

'You were always fond of elegies.' Siegfried turned away; he glanced out of the window, down to the grass and the shrubbery, the pebbled paths obscured by wych elms. The scene was just beginning to glow faintly blue with the dawn. Yellow was in the sky, draped richly over the brown horizon. He had thought then that at last there was a stir of gratefulness for being alive and in hospital in Scotland; it was some years before he came to regret not looking at Wilfred.

'That's what my elegy is about,' said Wilfred. '"What candles may be held…?" None, perhaps, but there will be poems to write; and you'll write them.'

'Yes, I'll be locked up here till the end of the war, writing cantankerous jingles and bad impressions of Masefield while you go to France and—'

'Write as you taught me to, you stupid, silly, bloody man!'

A flush had leapt to Wilfred's cheeks. Siegfried saw for the first time the potential in Wilfred for a stunning, angelic fury; that was the sort of fury that had to be directed towards the generals and the profiteers, towards every civilian who cheered at the arrival of a hospital train full of mangled men. So Wilfred would write; that was enough.

Was it that thought, Siegfried later wondered, which had killed Wilfred? Siegfried believed that it was enough for Wilfred to write; and Wilfred did write; but Siegfried had been wrong. It would have been enough for Wilfred to live, and damn all the rest. Siegfried sometimes thought of burning every copy of Wilfred's poems, as if destroying one thing would return the other to him.

What had it been like to have Wilfred in front of him? That night Wilfred's color was high; he was not the pallid (pallor/palls, Siegfried could not help thinking), stammering ('the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle') nerve case ('in all my dreams, before my helpless sight') that Siegfried had met in August. Whatever resemblance he bore to that man was a product of Siegfried's paternal bias; Siegfried was like the aged father who sees the grown son as an infant. Wilfred, however, rebuked Siegfried as sharply and convincingly as any patriarch. There was a pure unconscious pride in him that prevented him from tolerating Siegfried's stupidity. But in a gesture of friendship, he subdued himself, and rather than apologise, said, 'I mean it.' 

Humiliatingly a tremble, probably obvious, came to Siegfried's lower lip. No tears were in his eyes; they were stopped up somewhere in his throat. To disguise this, he turned again towards the window, then followed an unannounced impulse to turn back and said, 'I'd like terribly to kiss you.'

'Oh!' said Wilfred.

At once Siegfried sprung up from the bed and strode to the window. In the trees the birds were beginning to cheep noisily. It wouldn't be so long until reveille, and neither of them had slept. God! thought Siegfried. God damn it! To think that in some other age they might have lain together (albeit in one of the rooms at the boarding-house on Half-Moon Street) for a long morning, then risen and had kippers and toast! He couldn't stand looking at Wilfred; he couldn't stand seeing his own wretchedness reflected.

'I'm sorry,' said Siegfried, 'a minute ago I took issue with your calling me silly, stupid, and bloody, but now I take your point.'

'Oh no,' chided Wilfred. He had appeared at Siegfried's side. 'Don't ascribe your own shame to me; I'm not ashamed of you.' There was no give to this statement, he did not for a moment simper or flatter; he was resolute. 'It's you who's taught me—among other things—precisely how much love I have in myself.'

Siegfried said dumbly, 'Love?'

'Yes. I had known kindness, I had known sympathy, and pity…' Wilfred, coming to face him, rested his hand on Siegfried's cheek. He had no tremor. 'But the love, I feel, was your doing mostly. The pity's in the poetry, the love is'—perhaps inadvertently, his thumb brushed Siegfried's cheek—'round about here.'

From below, reveille began to sound. Wilfred drew Siegfried near to him, so that their cheeks rested against each other. Wilfred's breath, Siegfried noted, smelt of his whisky; that, more or less, though warmer, would have been his taste. But Wilfred never kissed him. He leant his head on Siegfried's shoulder and allowed Siegfried to rock him until he softened.

 

* * *

 

At breakfast they sat across from each other and talked of writing. Wilfred had been having trouble collecting finished pieces for the _Hydra_ , as the patients were all intent on writing serialised stories, which would inevitably be left unfinished when they were passed for home service or transferred. The hero, always a stammering subaltern, never confessed his love; the battle, always the one that would end the war, was never won. Readers would apply to Wilfred for news of the stories' fate; it drove Wilfred dottier than he was in the first place.

'I don't suppose,' said Wilfred, buttering his toast, 'that I could beg you to help me gather an issue's worth of full-length pieces?'

'Since I'll be here till the building crumbles. Or until the war ends, whichever comes first.'

'It's only that you're the most capable person I can think of. If you don't do it, there won't be a finished story in the magazine.'

'Stuff the magazine.'

'All right, I see,' said Wilfred, and addressed a bashfully mischievous smile to his toast.

How the rest of the day passed, Siegfried didn't remember. A day or two afterwards, he may have been able to recall with some accuracy; not years, not decades later. He had, at this distance, an impression of an exceptionally golden light coming in through his window and waking him from a lovely dream about seeing David again—but that may have been another morning, a memory from after Wilfred was gone. He dreamt of David often; and the sun always came in from the east.

After Susan Owen wrote him to say that Wilfred could not respond to his letter as he was dead, Siegfried looked through his diaries and found that he had skipped most of the week of Wilfred's departure. In a letter to Robert dated about that time, he had written:

_Owen, by the way, has been passed for Light Duties and posted with the 5th Mancs at Scarborough. This eve. I will take him to Rivers' club and try to convey to him what good work he has done since Sept. I will attempt to avoid drinking so much that I become actually effusive. Also I plan to introduce him to R. Ross who I feel may be an influence, hopefully—dare I say it!—after the war; but in the meantime the acquaintance might please the both of them. Will you have him at your wedding? Owen I mean not R.R. Speaking of which I am sorry I could not wangle leave to attend. Best wishes to you and Nancy, and do say hello to Owen when you see each other._

Probably Robert had burnt their letters after the row, or after Siegfried had refused to lend him money several years after the row; it would have appealed to his theatrical sensibility. If not that, then he was keeping hold of them in hopes of selling them to collectors after Siegfried was dead, or when he was next in dire straits financially. Well then, well then, thought Siegfried, rising from his armchair in search of his pipe, more than that had been lost. He could not retrieve any of it but his pipe, which he discovered he had left on the bookshelf, in the space left by a book he had taken down.

Siegfried heard his own voice, a much younger voice, telling him: _Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand. / Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen, / And you're right as rain…._

He returned to his armchair to draw on his pipe. Leaning back, he shot rings of smoke into the still, hot air. He ached, he realised: his head throbbed, there was a twinge in his back, the arm he had broken in 1915 was becoming arthritic. Drink was turning his stomach sour (he kept a cup of whisky by his side), and his teeth were wearing away where he bit down on the stem of his pipe. _As we that are left grow old_ , he thought, laughing caustically. Certainly Wilfred would not have stood for 'sleeping beyond England's foam' ('like the foam on a pint?' Siegfried would have joked; Wilfred would perhaps have laughed). 

But Siegfried was old, and Wilfred was not. For Wilfred there was no arthritis, there was no failed marriage, there was no procession of ridiculous, shrieking young men; there were no memoirs, there were no volumes of outdated verse, there were no BBC writers asking for him to do a piece for the anniversary of the Armistice. There were no lines graven in his sainted face; in that sense he was one of the lucky ones. 

A log shifted in the fire, showering sparks onto the hearth-rug. The longcase clock ticked tiredly. Faint rain pattered against the windows, and far away, thunder tumbled over the Wiltshire pastures. Good, thought Siegfried, it was good that it rained. The gardens would be green. There was some apposite line of verse waiting just around the corner of his conscious mind, asking to be recalled, but Siegfried didn't care to search for the words. A slight doze was settling over him. It was in these dozes, where he wavered between all his dozens of old selves, that he always seemed to feel a hand on his face, or a head on his shoulder.

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Craiglockhart War Hospital, located in a suburb of Edinburgh, Scotland, was a former hydropathic that had been converted to a military psychiatric hospital for the treatment of officers suffering from war neuroses. Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart in summer 1917 in lieu of being court-martialed for making a public declaration against the war. Owen was treated for war neurosis between June-November 1917.
> 
> 2\. “Bank holidays, and picture shows, and spats, / And going to the office in the train.” Sassoon, _Dreamers_. It was published in the _Hydra_ , the hospital’s patient-run literary magazine (of which Owen was an editor), in September 1917.
> 
> 3\. David Cuthbert Thomas was a fellow officer in Sassoon’s regiment, and was close with Sassoon and Robert Graves. He was killed on the Western Front in 1916.
> 
> 4\. Owen was posted to Scarborough in November 1917 after being passed for light regimental duties.
> 
> 5\. 'When Captain Cook first sniff’d the wattle / And love Columbus’d Aristotle' is a line from Aylmer Strong’s 1917 volume of verse, _A Human Voice_. Sassoon gave Owen a copy with those lines inscribed in the front cover, in part because it was so bad it was funny and in part because introduction noted that ‘the proceeds … [were] intended to swell the funds of the Recuperative Hostels … established for the care of critical nerve-cases from the fronts’ (an introduction which Sassoon also thought was so bad it was funny).
> 
> 6\. The bit about Sassoon having 'I shall not ask Jean-Jacques Rousseau / If birds confabulate or no' (a Cowper couplet) stuck in his head while waiting to be court-martialed for making his declaration against the war was taken from Sassoon’s semi-autobiographical _Memoirs of an Infantry Officer_.
> 
> 7\. The psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers treated Sassoon at Craiglockhart.
> 
> 8\. Sassoon did take Owen out for a farewell dinner at Rivers’ club in Edinburgh (of which he was a temporary member). There he gave him a sealed envelope containing a £10 note and a letter of introduction to Robbie Ross, which he only opened after he left Craiglockhart.
> 
> 9\. The poem Sassoon and Owen discuss in Sassoon’s room (‘shall shine, shall be their pall’, ‘what candles may be held’, ‘the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’) is _Anthem for Doomed Youth_ , which Owen wrote at Craiglockhart. It was initially titled _To Dead Youth_ ; Sassoon helped to edit it, and suggested the final title. ‘In all my dreams, before my helpless sight’ is from _Dulce Et Decorum Est_ , which Owen wrote at about the same time.
> 
> 10\. ‘I know that he is lost among the stars, / And may return no more but in their light. / Though his hushed voice may call me in the stir / Of whispering trees, I shall not understand.’ —Sassoon, _The Last Meeting_.
> 
> 11\. The boarding house at Half-Moon Street was kept by a landlord who knew and protected her homosexual lodgers, one of whom was Robbie Ross.
> 
> 12\. Owen actually did beg for contributors to the _Hydra_ to submit finished pieces. See: his editorial in the issue published 1 September 1917.
> 
> 13\. ‘Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand. / Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen, / And you're right as rain….’ —Sassoon, Repression of War Experience.
> 
> 14\. ‘As we that are left grow old’/‘sleep[ing] beyond England’s foam’ are lines from Laurence Binyon’s poem _For the Fallen_.


End file.
